Donald Smith came out of the
wilderness to become the Lord Strathcona of to-day. Sir Alexander
Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts. A clerk in a
counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit
setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for
furs. Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper
Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he
fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions
is murdered, a second lamed, a third wounded. In all this Alexander
Mackenzie was successful while still in the prime of his manhood,--not
more than thirty years of age; and the reward of his success was to be
exiled to the sub-arctics of the Athabasca, six weeks' travel from
another fur post,--not a likely field to play the hero. Yet Mackenzie
emerged from the polar wilderness bearing a name that ranks with
Columbus and Carrier and La Salle.
[Illustration: Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer.]
Far north of the Missouri beyond the borderlands flows the
Saskatchewan. As far north again, beyond the Saskatchewan, flows
another great river, the Athabasca, into Athabasca Lake, on whose blue
shores to the north lies a little white-washed fort of some twenty log
houses, large barn-like stores, a Catholic chapel, an Episcopal
mission, and a biggish residence of pretence for the chief trader.
This is Fort Chipewyan.
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